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Ernest Dowson
Ernest Christopher Dowson (2 August 1867 – 23 February 1900) was an English poet, novelist, and writer of short stories, who was associated with the Decadent movement. Life Dowson was, born in Lee, London. He attended Queen's College, Oxford, but left before obtaining a degree.Adams p.17; he left in March 1888. In November 1888, he started working with his father at Dowson and Son, a dry-docking business in Limehouse, east London, established by the poet's grandfather. He led an active social life, carousing with medical students and law pupils, going to music halls, and taking the performers to dinner. Meanwhile, he was also working assiduously at his writing. He was a member of the Rhymers' Club, which included W.B. Yeats and Lionel Johnson. He was also a frequent contributor to the literary magazines The Yellow Book and The Savoy. Dowson collaborated on two unsuccessful novels with Arthur Moore, worked on a novel of his own, Madame de Viole, and wrote reviews for The Critic. In 1889, at the age of twenty-three, Dowson fell in love with eleven-year-old Adelaide "Missie" Foltinowicz, the daughter of a Polish restaurant owner. Adelaide is reputed to be the subject of one his best-known poems, Non Sum Qualis eram Bonae Sub Regno Cynarae. He pursued her unsuccessfully; in 1897, she married a tailor who lodged above her father's restaurant and Dowson was crushed. In August, 1894, Dowson's father, who was in the advanced stages of tuberculosis, died of an overdose of chloral hydrate. His mother, who was also consumptive, hanged herself in February, 1895, and soon Dowson began to decline rapidly. Robert Sherard one day found Dowson almost penniless in a wine bar and took him back to the cottage in Catford where he was himself living. Dowson spent the last six weeks of his life at Sherard's cottage and died there of alcoholism at the age of 32. He is buried in the Roman Catholic section of nearby Brockley and Ladywell Cemeteries. In anticipation of the anniversary of Dowson's birth on August 2, 2010, his grave, which had fallen derelict and been victimized by vandalism, was restored. The unveiling and memorial service were publicised in the local (South London Press) and national (BBC Radio 4 and the Times Literary Supplement) British press, and dozens paid posthumous tribute to the poet 110 years after his death. Writing He provides the earliest use of the word soccer in written language in the Oxford English Dictionary (although he spells it socca, presumably because it did not yet have a standard written form).[3] His prose works include the short stories collected as Dilemmas (1895), and the two novels A Comedy of Masks and Adrian Rome (each co-written with Arthur Moore). Some of his short prose was first published in the journal The Yellow Book. Recognition Dowson is best remembered for some vivid phrases, such as days of wine and roses from his poem Vitae Summa Brevis, which appears in stanza 2: :They are not long, the days of wine and roses: :Out of a misty dream :Our path emerges for a while, then closes :Within a dream. and "gone with the wind", from Non Sum Qualis eram Bonae Sub Regno Cynarae,"non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno Cynarae", "I am not what I was, under the reign of the good Cynara", is a quotation from Horace's Odes, Book IV,1 "vitae summa brevis spem nos vetat incohare longam..." the third stanza of which reads: :I have forgot much, Cynara! gone with the wind, :Flung roses, roses riotously with the throng, :Dancing, to put thy pale, lost lilies out of mind; :But I was desolate and sick of an old passion, :Yea, all the time, because the dance was long: :I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion. The last line, the last line of all four stanzas of the poem, was the inspiration for the song title "Always True to You in My Fashion" from Kiss Me, Kate by Cole Porter, which in turn inspired a similar line in "Fashion Victim" by Carole Pope and Kevan Staples of Rough Trade. In her words, it was the "far away, faintly sad sound I wanted" of the third stanza's first line that inspired Margaret Mitchell to call her only novel Gone with the Wind. Publications * Ernest Dowson, The Stories of Ernest Dowson, ed. by Mark Longaker (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1947) * Ernest Dowson, The Poems of Ernest Dowson, ed. by Mark Longaker (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1962) * Ernest Dowson, The Letters of Ernest Dowson, ed. by Desmond Flower and Henry Maas (London: Cassell, 1967) * Ernest Dowson, The Poetry of Ernest Dowson, ed. by Desmond Flower (Cranbury, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1970) *Victor Plarr ed., Ernest Dowson 1888-1897: Reminiscences, Unpublished Letters and Marginalia, with a bibliography compiled by H. Guy Harrison (New York: Laurence J. Gomme, 1914). References * See also sections in: Madonnas and Magdalens - the origins and developments of Victorian sexual attitudes. London. Eric Trudgill. (Heinemann, 1976). * Jad Adams, Madder Music, Stronger Wine: The Life of Ernest Dowson, Poet and Decadent (London: I.B. Tauris & Co., 2000) * Elisa Bizzotto, La mano e l'anima. Il ritratto immaginario fin de siÃ¨cle (Milano: Cisalpino, 2001) * Jean-Jacques Chardin, Ernest Dowson et la crise fin de siÃ¨cle anglaise (Paris: Editions Messene, 1995) * Linda Dowling, Language and Decadence in the Victorian Fin de SiÃ¨cle (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986) * Ifor Evans, English Poetry in the Later Nineteenth Century (London: Methuen, 1966) * Ian Fletcher, Decadence and the 1890s (London: Edward Arnold, 1979) * Graham Hough, The Last Romantics (London: Duckworth, 1949) * Holbrook Jackson, The Eighteen Nineties (London: Jonathan Cape, 1927) * Mark Longaker, Ernest Dowson: A Biography (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1945) * Henry Maas, Ernest Dowson: Poetry and Love in the 1890s (London: Greenwich Exchange, 2009) * Franco Marucci, Storia della letteratura inglese dal 1870 al 1921 (Firenze: Le Lettere, 2006) * * Murray G. H. Pittock, Spectrum of Decadence: The Literature of the 1890s (London: Routledge, 1993) * Mario Praz, La carne, la morte e il diavolo nella letteratura romantica (Firenze: Sansoni, 1976) * Bernard Richards, English Poetry of the Victorian Period (London: Longman, 1988) * Thomas Burnett Swann, Ernest Dowson (New York: Twayne, 1964) * Arthur Symons, The Memoirs of Arthur Symons, ed. by Karl Beckson (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1977) * William Butler Yeats, Autobiographies (London: Macmillan, 1955) Notes External links ;Poems * "Envoy" (to Verses). * Selected poetry of Ernest Dowson 3 poems (A Last Word, Non Sum Qualis Eram Bonae sub Regno Cynarae, Vit{ae} Summa Brevis Spem nos Vetet Incohare Longam) at Representative Poetry Online.. ;Books * [http://poetry.elcore.net/CatholicPoets/Dowson/index.html Poems (1900)] * ;About * Arthur Symons' memoir of Dowson. * Dowson, Schoenberg and the birth of Modernism, Horizon Review Category:1867 births Category:1900 deaths Category:English poets Category:Alumni of The Queen's College, Oxford Category:English Roman Catholics Category:Converts to Roman Catholicism Category:People from Lee, London Category:Roman Catholic writers Category:19th-century poets Category:English-language poets Category:Poets Category:Sonneteers